2020 John and Jane Dunning Copper Fellows
The Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics is proud to announce that Soham Prajapati, Anjanroop Singh, and Marc Plasseraud are the recipients of the 2020 John and Jane Dunning Copper Fellowship for passing their Written Preliminary Examinations.
John and Jane Copper established the fellowship in order to recognize the University of Minnesota’s contribution to preparing John for a successful career. In 1957, John graduated with an Aeronautical Engineering degree from the University of Minnesota. He worked at McDonnell Douglas, a major American aerospace manufacturing corporation and defense contractor, for 35 years. The John and Jane Dunning Copper Fellowship is used to acknowledge students who possess an outstanding academic record and show promise after completing their WPE’s.
Soham Prajapati studied at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India from 2015 to 2019, earning a Bachelor of Technology in Aerospace Engineering. He joined the University of Minnesota for his graduate studies, and is now working alongside Professor Krishnan Mahesh.
“My research work is to understand sound radiation from structures excited by turbulent flow. We are performing fluid-structure interaction simulations to investigate the relationship between the turbulent fluid sources and the sound radiated from the vibration,” he said
Anjanroop Singh is an Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics international student working on Phase Transformations and Compatibility in Objective Structures.
He said, “An objective structure is a collection of atoms represented by mass points for which every atom sees precisely the same atomic environment, up to rotation (or, more generally, orthogonal transformations) and translation.”
Singh was raised in Punjab, India, and studied at the India Institute of Technology, Roorkee, where he completed his undergraduate studies. He has been at the University of Minnesota for the past eight months under the guidance of Professor Richard James.
“It was Professor James’ lectures on continuum mechanics and brainstorming sessions that led me to achieve the honor of the award.”
Marc Plasseraud currently works with Professor Krishnan Mahesh on resolving the flow around a prolate spheroid.
“It is a canonical geometry, which, despite its simplicity, presents similar flow features observed in more complex obstacles,” he said.
Plasseraud earned his engineering degree in hydrodynamics and ship engineering from Ecole Centrale de Nantes in Nantes, France. After graduating, he moved to Houston, Texas for work as a naval architect at Bureau Veritas before joining the university.
The department applauds these candidates and wishes them the best in their research and future endeavors.